


When They Carve My Name Inside the Concrete

by TheBigBlackHat



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Careers (Hunger Games), District 1, District 3, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Hair as Protest, One Shot, pre-rebellion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-23 14:47:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11404647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigBlackHat/pseuds/TheBigBlackHat
Summary: In the course of a single Games, Katniss's iconic braid becomes both an object of obsession for the Capitol and a symbol of the rebellion for the Districts. Twelve one-shots centered around girls, the Games, and hair.





	1. Prayin to Catch You Whispering

Calligraphy has wrangled me into helping her with her hair for Reaping day. I wish I didn’t have to. I have made a point of keeping my distance from volunteers once they are selected.

During my first years at the Academy I didn’t know better. I had to watch three close friends die. Since then it has been easier to drift away, to sever ties myself before the Capitol does it for me, and brutally. Too bad it didn’t work this year.

I have always has a soft spot for Calligraphy, I muse, as I gently wrap her hair around hot irons and wait for luxurious curls to form. She is two years younger than me, sixteen this year, but I have known her since before we came to the Academy. We are both daughters of prominent houses in One, the type of girls who have been pressured to be perfect in every way since before we could talk. Our main role in life has been to bring honor and prestige to our families. She is to do so by volunteering, and presumably, by winning. I am being sold to a wealthy man in the Capitol as soon as I age out of the Reapings.

She will earn her family honor and fame. I will earn mine money and prestige. 

I am leaving for the Capitol this afternoon.

I will watch her in the Tribute Parade from the stands in the Capitol.

Would we trade places if we could?

“Luxa?”

She startles me from my musings. My hands pause in their work before starting back up. This hairstyle is elaborate and I have no time to lose.

“What?” I ask tersely, and immediately regret it. This day is just as stressful for Calligraphy as it is for me.

“I’m sorry.”

 

My hands pause again as she catches me off guard. I have a good feeling what she is apologizing for. I wish she wouldn’t. Sincere apologies are not the way here in One.

“You needn’t be. I am happy to be able to bring honor to my family in such a prestigious way. I imagine you feel the same.”

It is a warning and a reminder. We have our roles to play, and she will only endanger the both of us if she wants to talk frankly today. 

“Talk plainly, Luxa. This will be the last chance we have to do so.”

I laugh bitterly. She never heeds my advice. I ought to tell her to take down D2M at the Cornucopia. That would serve her right for being so bullheaded.

I lean in close under the pretense of fixing a flyaway curl and whisper in her ear: “Like there’s a room in the mansions in One that isn’t bugged.”

She gazes over her shoulder at me and gives me a smug half smile.

“This one’s not.”

I don’t bother to ask how she knows, if she knows for sure. I trust her, and I am hardly going to question words I am happy to hear on a day like today.

I keep my hands working away at her hair as I start to talk.

“I’m scared. The Capitol is even more of a snake pit than One. One wrong word and you disappear.”

 

Calligraphy, curse her, responds without hesitation.

“That’s not what you’re scared of. You’ve been playing in snake pits since you were born.”

 

I can’t bring myself to speak. My silence is complicity enough.

“I’m sure we’ve heard the same sorts of stories.”

I know exactly what stories she means. Stories of all the abuses girls suffer at the hands of Capitol men. Girls who happily commit treason so they can escape their buyers by serving as Avoxes. Girls who are forced to bear children for infertile Capitol women then are passed on to other families as soon as the baby is born.

I am being sold to the owner of a prominent jewelry store chain in the Capitol. My family will be among the richest in One after this transpires.

My buyer first expressed interest in me when he was in One for a victory tour and happened to strike up a conversation about the mineral industry here with my father. My mother did not tell me of this until I was fourteen. I realised it myself when I was twelve.

My buyer has been married twenty years. He and his wife have yet to produce any children.

I think of the way his fingers nearly drew blood when he pinched my cheeks at dinner parties.

I think of the way he caressed my figure as we danced and told me my breeding was good enough to pass as Capitol.

“Would it be so terribly selfish,” I ask haltingly, “if I were to wish I was the one going into the Arena next week?”

 

Calligraphy snorts at this, an undignified sounds that wouldn’t be out of place among the girls who toil in the factories in Lower Town.

“You’re going into an Area same as I am. Don’t deny it.”

“Chances we make it out alive or sane?”

Another snort.

“Neither. And you don’t leave the Arena, even when you win. Cashmere is proof enough of that.”

“I don’t even get to win. The Games won’t end for me till I’m dead or an Avox. I lose no matter what.”

I am perilously close to tears.

Calligraphy picks up a cameo hairpin lying on the counter and idles it.

“Well, would you like a way to win?”

“Going to give me a nightlock pill?”

The bitch laughs. I imagine driving the hairpin into her scalp in spite. 

“Better. I’m going to give you a way to help end all this.”

Oh, she is a right fool.

“What games are you playing at, Calligraphy?”

She is not perturbed. She smiles the way every woman in One does when they know something you don’t.

“This isn’t a game. There are people in all the Districts, and plenty in the Capitol too. Several of the great houses in One are in.”

I am incredulous.

“And you think they have a chance?”

“Does it matter? You’ll die a slave, regardless.”

She’s right. I have absolutely nothing, and she is giving me everything. Who am I to question its veracity?

“Fine. What’s my way out?”

She holds the cameo up to me. It shows a bonneted woman on a blood red background.

“Recording device. Transmits to archives in District 3. Right now, they’re wanting everything we can get them, even the things that seem innocuous or useless. Lay it in a sunny windowsill to charge. Tap twice to turn it on, once to turn it off. It should hold up against most sensors.”

I hold the pin hesitantly, wondering when the Peacekeepers will bust in and drag us away.

“How many girls…”

“Not enough. We try to get to every girl before they leave, but most are too scared to take the chance.”

I slip the pin in my pocket. Surely this is what salvation feels like. Surely this is what a Victor feels when they see the hovercraft ladder descending from the sky.

“Have any been caught?”

She turns to me and smiles.

“Not that we know of. It’s girls from One, after all.”

I smile a little at that too.

“Figures. Your hair’s done, we should starting heading to the square. Wouldn’t do to have a late Volunteer.”

Calligraphy rises gracefully from her chair and toward the door. She doesn’t bother to take a last glance at a room we will never see again, something I find I can’t help myself from doing.

She pauses with a hand on the doorknob, turns back to me, and beckons me close. 

“One last thing. If you do happen to run into trouble, there’s a phrase that will make the pin self-destruct. It will take you out too, if you’re close enough.”

She smiles a vicious, smug smile, letting the implications of that sink in, then brushes my hair back and presses her lips to my ear: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”


	2. May the Last One Burn into Flames

She has worn her hair short like the factory girls have to ever since the Games last year. Her best friend, Coil, is- was- a factory girl. Coil wore her hair short in the ugly bowl cut that is mandated for all the girls who work in the factories- long hair catches too easily in the machines- and wore it that way in the Games too, since her stylist was an incompetent twit who couldn’t be bothered to make it look nicer.

Coil came in fifth in the Games last year. She was smart and funny and unfailingly kind. She deserved to live just as much as every other child sent into the arena. The Games announcers were still making fun of her haircut as she lay dying.

Somewhere between that and Coil’s body arriving in District 3 wearing an ugly Capitol wig, she took a knife to her own hair and hacked at it till it laid in the same ugly bowl cut as Coil’s had.

The Games interviewer, who until that point had been interviewing her daily as the field was narrowed down, did not allow her on camera again.

She decides to keep her hair short for the year. She deserves to mourn in the only way she can. Coil, who had no family and lived as another nameless face in the factory and the community home, deserves to be mourned.

At first people give her double takes on the street as she walks by. They stare and try to comprehend how clean, new clothes and a poor factory haircut might belong on the same person. Sometimes after a minute a light will flicker on in a passerby’s eyes as they recognize her from the Games interviews. 

“Her best friend,” they whisper and motion at her to their companions as they walk by. “Yes, the poor little girl whose hair they made fun of in the Games last year. Such a shame.”

Sometimes they say nothing, but look her in the eye as they pass by, give her a nod and a look that is half pity and half admiration.

Her mother fainted when she saw it the first time. Her father backhanded her across the face for her foolishness. They try to persuade her to grow her hair out again, but there is nothing they can really do to stop her from keeping it short. They chide her every night nonetheless. They ask her how? how?! are they supposed to find her a suitable man when she insists on keeping her beautiful hair chopped short and ugly like a common factory girl? She laughs happily and tells them that at least this way the boy they pick will have to love her for more than her looks.

Her mother tells her quietly one night after dinner that she does admire her for doing this, but that she does not see how it will make any difference. Sometimes she wonders if her mother is right.

The factory girls, at least, seem to appreciate it. They know as well as anyone that she was Coil’s best friend, and they are glad to see that someone is remembering and mourning her. They may think her crazy, or see her as a foolish rich girl, to cut her hair like this when she does not have to, but that does not stop the fact that they walk about the city with their heads held a little higher every day.

Her classmates, the daughters of engineers and factory managers, the closest things District 3 has to wealth, make fun of her at first. They don’t understand why she bothered to be friends with a common factory girl, nor why would bother to grieve for another of the endless line of District 3 girls dead from the Games, nor why she would choose to grieve in such an absurd way. She sits in the classroom day after day and endures them, thinking of the way Coil had to endure the entire Capitol teasing her.

Then one day she snaps and screams at them, tears rushing unashamedly down her face. She is not crying for herself. She yells at them exactly why she is doing this, how Coil deserved so much better than what happened to her and how she deserves to be remembered and mourned by at least one person in this goddamn country.

She shocks them all into silence before the mayor’s daughter finally speaks in a quiet, halting voice, and asks her to tell them about Coil. She does, though the tears don’t stop.

She tells them how smart Coil was. She talks about the inventions Coil always crafted from abandoned scrap metal. She talks about the time Coil saved a factory foreman, one of her classmate’s parents, with her cleverness and quick thinking. She tells them about how she smuggled an advanced maths textbook to Coil because she had to work instead of going to school but still wanted to learn.

She tells them about Coil’s kindness and sense of humor, how she would work late in the factories every day so that she would have more money to buy food for other children at the community home. She talks about the way she would share those late night shifts with worn down parents trying desperately to provide for the hungry mouths at home. She talks about how Coil got to know the workers, how she smiled and joked with them and made that shift the best part of their day.

She tells them lastly about Coil’s rashness, how it lead her into trouble more often than not. She tells them she thinks it was what kept Coil alive in the Games so long, but was also what lead to her death at the hands of the Games’ eventual victor, a boy from District 2 named Domitian.

She does not talk about the Games other than that, except to mention that she cut her hair in a moment of rage due to the Games commentators’ cruel disregard for Coil’s final moments.

When she is done speaking, the room is silent, aside from a few girls sniffling softly. Then the mayor’s daughter rises and tells her thank you. She tells her that Coil will not be forgotten now, that they will all remember her, and that they will pass this remembrance on to others as well.

The mayor’s daughter comes to school the next day with her lovely black hair in an ugly factory bowl cut.

Over the next three weeks every girl in the school follows suit.

By the time the victory tour rolls around, half the girls in the district seem to have taken knives or scissors to their hair. Domitian glares coldly at an audience filled with mimicries of the girl whose neck he wrung with his bare hands, then left to slowly suffocate to death. The Capitol commentators for the tour do not mention it, but she is sure the Capitol has taken notice of their little rebellion.

She wishes she could take back the words she said to her classmates when she walks through the streets and realizes just how gravely she has put the district at risk. But she knows this has grown into something that is entirely beyond her control. She has tapped into a collective well of anger and grief that has been building for decades. In a way, she feels as powerless now as she did watching Coil die thousands of miles from her and yet only a few feet away from her face.

She decides to do what she can, regardless.

She calls together the original girls she told about Coil, asks them to spread this message as well as they spread the first. Then she tells them what they should say if they are Reaped or are used for Games interviews, how best to explain the hair. She tells them to mention their district’s only female victor, Wiress, who continues to wear her hair in the same factory bowl cut she wore as a child and as a teenager in the Games. She tells them to say they did it to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Wiress’s victory, that they hope they/District 3’s tribute this year will be able to channel Wiress’s cleverness in this year’s Games.

The Capitol will not be fooled, she thinks. But perhaps they will appreciate the effort, and this will earn this year’s tribute a mildly less gruesome death than she might otherwise have had.

The day of the Reaping comes, and every girl in the square is wearing the same factory bowl cut. Her eyes fill with tears as she takes in the sight, and she could not be more proud of her district. She also could not possibly be more terrified. The fear that her name will be drawn from the bowl is paltry compared to the terror that fills her when she thinks of the punishment the district will face for their disrespect. 

Her legs begin to give as she thinks of what might happen. How many children will starve because of her in the next winter? How many workers will be forced to work extra shifts and go without sleep until they make a mistake that costs them a finger, a limb, their life? 

Her classmates don’t question her reaction as they grab her and prop her up before she can fall. They escort her to the section for fifteen year olds and stand close to her, ready to catch her lest she fall again. 

She makes it through the speeches by gazing up at the stage and the gray sky above. She refuses to think about the sea of girls that surround her, how she has placed each and every one of them in danger thanks to foolish decisions she made when she was caught in the thoughtless grasp of her emotions. 

This a Reaping just like any other, she tells herself. She will not be able to breathe from the fear if she does not. 

The escort calls the boys first this year, though she hardly notices who is brought to the stage. She keeps her eyes focused above the stage, tracing the lines of the filigree carved on the proscenium of the justice building.

They only depart from this motion when she hears the girl’s name called in a clear, crisp voice.

“Electra Li.”

She could laugh. She might have actually laughed. At the sound of her name, the dread that has clamped down on her for months suddenly dissipates. Her district will not suffer because of her. No one but herself is going to die for her actions.

This a price she would pay a hundred times over, and she tells Beetee as much when he gives her a knowing, pitying look as she boards the train. 

She thinks of sticking to the lie she told the girls to tell, should they end up as tribute, of attempting to maybe save herself and make it out of the Games alive. She doesn’t think on it long. She is here because the Capitol wants her dead, and there is no denying that. There will be no saving herself through lies and cowardice. The only road to salvation is to finish the path her actions have laid out for her.

She doesn’t allow her stylist and prep team to do anything with her hair except wash and comb it. She wears it in the bowl cut for the tribute parade and training, hoping the mild attention this garners will goad Caesar into asking about it during her interview. He does, happily, and she tells him the truth, or at least a Capitol-sanctioned version of the truth. She tells Caesar, the whole Capitol, the whole country, about Coil, the same things she told her classmates, how smart and kind and lovely she was. 

She tells Caesar that she means to honor Coil by wearing her hair like this, how she hopes she will be able to play the Games with as much courage and daring and cleverness as Coil.

Then Caesar uses this to launch into a discussion of her training score, and the moment is over, but it doesn’t matter. The whole country will remember Coil now, and they will remember her as so, so much more than a girl with an ugly haircut.

The TV is playing interview recaps when she gets back to the training center, interspersed with Capitolites’ reactions and commentary on the interview. She stays up a little while to watch- how on earth is she going to sleep tonight- and laughs when the cameras show all the women showing off their newly bought wigs- ugly bowl cuts that look just like hers. She can’t help but laugh it all, and she hopes Coil is laughing too, wherever she happens to be now.

Three weeks later her body is returned to District 3, thankfully lacking a Capitol wig. In fact, a Captiol mortician takes the time to carefully clean and brush her hair, and when her body is laid in a coffin, he makes sure her hair is arranged just as it was the day she came to the Capitol.

The bowl cut trend lasts several months in the Capitol. It is eventually replaced around the time of the year’s victory tour, when the milkmaid braid that year’s victor wore at her own reaping surges into popularity.

Most of the girls in District 3 who have the option choose to grow their hair back out after that year’s Games, or rather, their parents choose for them, undoubtedly fearing for their safety. The bowl cut is worn primarily by poor factory workers until the months leading up to the third Quarter Quell, when it becomes a well known fact that Wiress, the district’s only female victor, will be sent into the Games again. 

On the day of the Reaping for the 75th annual Hunger Games, there is not a girl in the square who is not wearing the same ugly bowl cut that Wiress has worn since she was a girl.


End file.
